Enron Case Study Analysis Of A Business

Enron Case study

This Enron case study presents our own analysis of the spectacular rise and fall of Enron. Itis the first in a new series assessing organisations against ACG’s Golden Rules of corporate governance and applying our proprietary rating tool.

As we say in our business ethics examples homepage introducing this series, the first and most critical rule is an ethical approach, and this should permeate an organisation from top to bottom. We shall therefore always start with an assessment of the ethical approach of the organisation. The way this creates the culture determines the performance in relation to the other four Rules.

The Enron case study: history, ethics and governance failures

Introduction: why Enron?

Why pick Enron? The answer is that Enron is a well-documented story and we can apply our approach with the great benefit of hindsight to show how the end result could have been predicted. It is also a good example to illustrate how ethics drives culture which in turn pushes the ethical boundaries and is a key influence on all the four other key elements of good corporate governance.

Hence, in advance of using our own membership for the survey input we can apply the very detailed findings from the post crash dissection of Enron. Readers who are interested can go to Wikipedia and burrow into the history of Enron and its major players. They can also study the various accounts that have been written and which are referred to in Wikipedia. We particularly commend “The Smartest Guys in the Room”, the story of Enron’s rise and fall, by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, and we gratefully acknowledge the valuable insights we have drawn from this fascinating book in producing our Enron case study.

Below is a brief résumé of Enron’s spectacular rise in fifteen years to a market valuation of nearly $100bn and its precipitous collapse. We have prepared a detailed history (around 20,000 words) with our own annotations, which will soon be available as an ebook for those who would like to draw their own conclusions. We have also applied our proprietary survey tool to Enron and imagined how the various stakeholder groups might have responded to a business ethics survey at a critical time in Enron’s history, mid 2000, eighteen months before it suddenly collapsed. The results of this survey are summarised below.

History of Enron

Enron was created in 1986 by Ken Lay to capitalise on the opportunity he saw arising out of the deregulation of the natural gas industry in the USA. What started as a pipelines company was transformed by the vision of a McKinsey consultant, Jeff Skilling, who had the idea of applying models used in the financial services industry to the deregulated gas industry.

He persuaded Enron to set up a Gas Bank through which buyers and sellers of natural gas could transact with each other using an intermediary (Enron) whose contractual arrangements would provide both parties with reliability and predictability regarding pricing and delivery. Enron duly recruited him to run this business and he rapidly built up a major gas trading operation through the early nineties.

During this time Enron was extending its pipeline operations into a wider power supply business, initially in the USA and then on an international scale, completing a large plant at Teesside in the UK and contracting to build a huge plant near Mumbai in India. In due course it had deals all round the globe, from South America to China. The hard driving expansion of Enron’s power business worldwide created a global reputation for Enron.

Skilling’s vision was to transform Enron into a giant, asset-light operation, trading power generally and his next target was trading electricity. Lay was lobbying Washington hard to deregulate electricity supply and in anticipation he and Skilling took Enron into California, buying a power plant on the west coast.

Enron’s national reputation rested on the rapid expansion of its domestic business and its steadily growing revenue and earnings from trading. So on the back of his track record, Skilling was appointed Chief Operating Officer by Ken Lay and he then embarked upon transforming the whole of Enron to reflect his vision.

Observing the dotcom boom, Skilling decided Enron could create a business based on a broadband network which could supply and trade bandwidth and he set out to build this at a great pace.

However, the experiment in deregulation in California didn’t work well and in due course was reversed with recriminations all round. Moreover, the international business expansion wasn’t underpinned by adequate administration and many of the contracts later turned bad.

So Enron then took the decision to build on its international presence by becoming a global leader in the water industry and bought a big water company in the UK, following it up with a big deal in Argentina.

At this point, around 2000, Enron’s reputation was still riding high and Lay and Skilling were looked up to as visionary thinkers and top business leaders.

However, as we see elsewhere in this case study, the rapid expansion had run well ahead of Enron’s ability to fund it, and to address the problem, it had secretly created a complex web of off-balance sheet financing vehicles. These, unwisely, were ultimately secured, and hence dependent, on Enron’s rapidly rising share price.

Also, its hard driving culture was underpinned by incentive schemes which promised, and delivered, huge rewards in compensation packages to outstanding performers. The result was that, to achieve results, aggressive accounting policies were introduced from an early stage. In particular, the use of mark to market valuation on contracts produced artificially large earnings, disguising for some years underlying poor profitability in major parts of the business.

This, of course, meant that Enron was not generating adequate cashflow, while spending extravagantly on expansion, and eventually it blew up suddenly and dramatically. Colleagues of this author who met Lay and had dealings with Enron confirm that there was scepticism in the market about Enron’s profitability and its cash position. Suspicions grew that Enron’s earnings had been manipulated and in late summer 2001 it emerged that its Chief Finance Officer had privately made himself rich at Enron’s expense through the off-balance sheet vehicles. About this time the dotcom boom ended suddenly and for Enron, this coincided with the international power business going radically wrong, the broadband business having to be shut down, the water business collapsing and the electricity services business getting into serious trouble in California. Enron’s share price started to slide and Skilling, appointed Chief Executive Officer in January 2001, resigned in August.

Enron’s share price then rapidly declined, triggering repayment clauses in the financing vehicles which Enron couldn’t handle. Its credit rating went to junk status, which caused the share price to collapse and triggered further crystallising of debt obligations. Banks refused further finance, suppliers refused to supply and customers stopped buying.

At the beginning of December 2001, Enron filed for the biggest bankruptcy the USA had yet seen.

This, in turn, took down one of the largest accounting firms in the world, Arthur Andersen, which was deemed to have so compromised its professional standards in its dealings with its client Enron that it was in many ways complicit in Enron’s criminal behaviour.

The second half of this Enron case study assesses business ethics and the impact on corporate governance, as measured against our Five Golden Rules.

Ethical assessment

Enron didn’t start out as an unethical business. As we have seen in this case study, what introduced the virus was the pursuit of personal wealth via very rapid growth. This led to the introduction of quite extreme incentive schemes to attract and motivate very bright and driven people, which, in turn, led to an unhealthy focus on short term earnings.

The next step was, naturally, to look at how earnings could be massaged to achieve the aggressive revenue and earnings targets. Since the massaged figures for growth in earnings still left a shortfall in cash, Enron quickly maxed out on its borrowing abilities.

But issuing more equity would have hurt the share price, on which most of the incentives were based. So schemes had to be created to produce funding secretly and this funding had to be hidden. In this way, an amoral and unethical culture developed in Enron in which customers, suppliers and even colleagues were misled and exploited to achieve targets. And the top management, who were rewarding themselves with these same incentive schemes, boasted that a pure, market-driven ethos was propelling Enron to greatness and deluded themselves that this equated to ethical behaviour. Lay even lectured the California authorities, whom Enron was cheating, that Enron was a model of business ethics.

Finally, the respected Arthur Andersen allowed greed for fees to over-rule the strong business ethics tradition of its founder and caused it to succumb to bending and suspending its professional standards, with fatal results.

Impact on Corporate Governance

Our five Rules of Good Corporate Governance start with the need for an ethical culture. Having established that Enron’s culture became progressively more deficient in this regard, let’s consider briefly the impact of this failure in business ethics on the other Rules.

Clear goal shared by all key stakeholders

Lay and, particularly Skilling, engendered in all the staff of Enron the goal of driving up the share price to the virtual exclusion of all else. The goal of achieving a long term satisfaction from a stable customer base took a distant second place to signing up deals. In California, the customers were deliberately exploited by the traders to the maximum extent their ingenuity could achieve. Even internally, the Chief Finance Officer’s funding scheme was designed to make him rich at his employer’s expense.

Strategic management

As a McKinsey consultant specialising in strategy, Skilling had a very clear vision, at least initially, of what he wanted Enron to achieve. However, he wasn’t interested in management per se and allowed operational management to wither. But his vision of a huge trading enterprise wasn’t carried down to the next level of developing and implementing practical business plans, as evidenced by his crazy launch into broadband, a field in which he had no personal knowledge or experience and in which Enron had almost no capability or likelihood of raising the funds required to implement the project

Organisation resourced to deliver

Skilling became COO on the departure of a very tough and experienced predecessor. Even at that point, Enron had been expanding at a rate which outran its ability to set up appropriate and adequate administrative systems and controls. Added to which it had always been short of funds. Skilling’s lack of interest in operational management meant that on his appointment at COO, he made a poor situation much worse by making bad managerial appointments. His focus on rapid growth incentivised by very generous compensation schemes, and with inadequate spending controls, created a totally dysfunctional organisation.

Transparency and accountability

From the early stages, Enron’s focus on earnings and share price growth and the related financial incentives led to a necessary lack of transparency as the figures were fiddled.. One could argue that Enron felt very much accountable to their shareholders for delivering consistent above average growth in Enron’s market capitalisation. However, this growth was achieved by subterfuge and deception. Certainly the dealings in California were as far from transparent as it was possible to be.

Finally, we bring a unique perspective to this Enron case study by using our proprietary survey tool, the ACGi, to rate the company, as at June 2000, and drawing conclusions from the results.

Conclusion and rating by our Survey tool

The flaws in Enron should have been spotted from early on, and indeed were periodically commented on by various observers from the early nineties onward. If independent ethical and corporate governance surveys had been conducted by independent parties they would have highlighted the growing problems. To illustrate, consider the hypothetical survey summarised in the following chart.

The scores out of ten (high is good) result from a set of questions which aim at deriving an independent, unbiased view from the interviewees, based on observations of corporate behaviour. What we have called the “sniff test” represents the personal view of the interviewee and would take into account their gut feel about the corporation and its management and owners. The highlighted scores would point the observer to clear problem areas.

customers and local communities thought they were breaking regulations

customers and suppliers thought they were probably bending their own rules

customers, shareholders, suppliers, financiers and local communities thought they were not truly honest.

It is clear with the benefit of hindsight that what started out as an imaginative and ground-breaking idea, which transformed the natural gas supply industry, rapidly evolved into a megalomaniac vision of creating a world-leading company. Intellectual self confidence mutated into contempt for traditional business models and created an environment in which top management became divorced from reality. The obsessive focus on driving the share price obscured the lack of basic controls and benchmarks and the progressive dishonesty in generating revenue and earnings figures in order to deceive the stock market led to the management deceiving themselves about the true situation.

Right up to nearly the end, Enron complied with all its regulatory requirements. The failings in these regulations led directly to Sarbanes-Oxley. But all the extra reporting in SarBox didn’t prevent the global financial meltdown in 2008 as the banks gamed the regulatory system. Now we have Dodd-Frank. What we actually need is independent Corporate Governance surveys.

If you found this summary useful, you may be interested in our full ebook :

52 pages of detailed analysis of the Enron scandal

An annotated walk-through of the history and ethics of the company

Detailed explanations of the governance failures leading to the scandal

Guidance for students of corporate governance

Annexe with lessons for setting up stakeholder research

You will also get a FREE version of our rating tool to adjust the scores according to your own assessment of the information presented in the full Enron Case Study.

Download the full Enron Case Study in PDF format for just £2.49 (c.$3.52)

If you have any questions on any aspect of this case study, please get in touch using the contact form and we will be delighted to answer them.

If you have any comments or experience of Enron, please leave a contribution using the form at the bottom of this page.

What's your view or experience of Enron?

How do you feel about this Enron case study? Why not share your opinion and any experiences you may have of dealing with Enron?

Case-Study-So-What-is-It-WorthPrior Post where students discussed the case.

Turn up the VOLUME: Don’t believe the …..?

Enron-Case-Study-So-What-is-It-Worth My walk-through. I go straight to the balance sheet then calculate the returns on total capital in the business. These financial statements were easy to discard because of the size of the business and the poor returns. My estimate of $5 to $7 per share worth or 90% less than the current share price, was wrong. The company was worth $0. This is more a case of institutional imperative and incentive-based bias. Wall Street was feeding at the financial trough to keep raising money for Enron (to keep the bad businesses afloat) so guess what the financial analysts (CFAs and MBAs) suggested? Buy! I guess the market is not ALWAYS efficient.

Forget accounting scandals, this was a crappy business based on trading so no way to determine normalized earnings. When I was in Brazil and saw Enron’s newly-built generating plant sitting idle, I asked why. A project developer said he got paid by doing deals by their size not profitability, therefore, the bigger the white elephant, the better. When I called mutual funds who owned Enron as it was trading $77 per share to ask the analyst if he/she was aware of Enron’s declining businesses coupled with absurd price, I was told to shut up. As one analyst (Morgan Stanley?) told me, “I only believe what I want to believe and disregard the rest.”

Enron Annual Report 2000 Ha, ha! and Is Enron Overpriced?

The above august panel never answered why anyone would give capital to Enron? No one mentions the elephant in the room. Sad.

What does the above case have to do with net/nets and our course. Everything! Look at the numbers, think for thyself, ignore Wall Street, and be aware of incentives. Buying bad businesses at premium prices is a guarantee of financial death.

This is an aside, but based on the above Enron example, does value investing serve a SOCIAL purpose or benefit? Prof. Greenblatt doesn’t think so–you are just trading pieces of paper, but what do YOU think?

See these two venture capitalists explain the social purpose of their business:

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